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From what I've heard there's really not a great deal of difference between the life expectancy of people on the 12 (+ levels or even between them vs. Elaida level sisters, while there is about 3 times that gap between Elaida and Daigian. I don't know what you math-heads can make out of just that, though...

I want to work out the math here. So need some clarification. Dom, did you mean that the gap between Lanfear and Elaida in life expectancy is 1/3rd that of the gap between Elaida and Daigian? Or should I substitute Lanfear with someone weaker? And if so, what's the relationship between Life Expectancy Gap between Lanfear and Elaida, and Elaida and Daigian? That one piece of info can help me make a far more coherent strength list.

Oh, the numbers are all in the notes, but I haven't seen them in extenso. Terez can't only give tidbits, and nothing too specific, until the Encyclopedia is out. If that info isn't included, she will be able to share it then (if not the actual documents that, however, the Library might eventually make accessible online one day, at least as much information from them as possible under "fair use" terms).

What I meant you guys to discuss and puzzle out (at the time) is if the fact the life expectancy scale is perfectly linear from the very bottom level to level 1 means the strength scale (the "levels" is forcibly linear as well.

The Elaida thing was just an example using the info Terez already gave, not something that need be puzzled out. The gap in life expectancy between level 1 and Lanfear +12 = the gap between level 1 and level 12 etc. Level 1 to 24 is twice the gap, and level 1 to level 36 is three times the gap, 1-48 four times etc. It's purely linear, and the gain at each level isn't spectacular. A few years.

I'm not sure what to derive from this about strength gain with each level. But the "levels" appear to be units, nothing more than like cm marks on a ruler, except it's not decimal.

RJ even let himself some wriggling room for AS behaviors - likely because he could decide arbitrarily that a woman was closer to the level above her than to the bottom of her "level". Instead of establishing rules that it took a gap of x levels to show a behavior (eg: obedience), he always established that by pair (2 or 3 levels, 3-4 levels, 5-6 levels etc.) This means he could cheat when it came to the exact gap between two characters. Two women could have 3 levels, but this could be reduced at will to closer to 2 or expanded to closer to 4 (it just had to stay consistent). That was useful to keep some freedom for women whose strengths he couldn't simply change (because in cases where he had not given any strength clue yet, he simply changed one woman's strength if the relationship he now wanted to have between two sisterscouldn't work. That happened a whole lot of times apparently. He had picked AS characters for a story line then he had new ideas for specific developments to happen (fictitious example: "oh, that would be cool if Bera-Kiruna could pull rank", and he simply changed the strength he needed to make it happen. It looks like RJ had a bank of sisters following the bell curve, ajah distribution, national distribution etc. and when he needed one AS he picked her up from that database, sometimes tweaked her given name and age and strength a bit before she truly became "a character". That's apparently something like that system the notes show. He knew that x sisters were at Dumai's Wells and for LOC had pulled all of them out of his database. In later notes some strengths or first name or ajah or nationality had changed.